Charlottesville, Virginia is a small quiet city that houses nearly 50,000 people. Home to the University of Virginia, one of the top universities in the country that was founded by Thomas Jefferson in 1819. However, despite the strong reputation that both the city and school have, racism and white supremacist groups have lived in the shadows of Charlottesville for decades.
On Saturday, the entire country had their eyes on the city, where white supremacy groups gathered in record numbers to protest the removal of the General Robert E. Lee statue. In February, the Charlottesville City Council had voted 3-2 to remove the statue from the Emancipation Park, which was formerly Lee Park.
This was not the first time that the KKK has protested in Charlottesville. There was a march as recently as July regarding the statue’s removal. To protest in a community, a person or group of people must get a permit signed by city officials. This permit requires the location, amount of people, and cause. The Ku Klux Klan’s “Unite the Right” group got this permit and was within their rights to peacefully demonstrate against the decision to remove the statue. Antifascist groups also applied and were granted permits disclosing their footprint and location to protest against the white supremacists.
Violence erupted between the two groups, and the protest was anything but peaceful. Police ended up using tear gas to break it up. People were using sticks and fire torches to fight. One woman, Heather Hayer, was killed and dozens more were injured after a white supremacist, James Alex Fields, Jr., drove through the crowd of counter-protesters. The scene looked much like it did back in the 1960s and 70s when violence broke out during protests scattered throughout the country after Jim Crow laws were abolished and segregation formally ended.
Have we not learned from our history?
Sociology professor David Cunningham at the Washington University in St. Louis has extensively studied the Ku Klux Klan and the group’s tendencies. In an interview with Red Alert Politics, he pinpointed why he thinks racially-charged violence is back in the headlines.
“I think it would have been unheard of to say that you could mobilize a thousand people before this year,” Cunningham said.
What he is noticing is racially-charged groups, like white supremacists, are organizing and mobilizing together more so than we’ve seen in the past 30 years. In part, he blames the climate of the country, saying that for the first time in a while these groups feel the nation is more supportive of protests and the collective action.
“I think a lot of these groups emerged because they felt threatened under the Obama Administration, but I think the type of response by President Trump or lack of response that he’s given in terms of condemning these groups has really provided them a license to act in new ways,” Cunningham explained.
President Trump has faced widespread criticism from both Republicans and Democrats after he failed to denounce the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, and white nationalists, by name, in his statements following the riots. He later made a second statement, correcting his initial mistake. Some people have criticized the president by arguing that Trump has created a more polarizing climate in the United States that allows racist groups to capitalize. However, Cunningham said this rise from the radical right started mobilizing under the Obama Administration.
“Under President Obama, what we saw was the sharp rise in the number of groups on the radical right that were formed. These are groups that perceive that their way of life is under threat by the Obama administration,” Cunningham said.
The difference the country is seeing in the past year, Cunningham says, is the mobilization of these radical groups.
“I did a lot of work looking at the KKK in the 1960s and that was a gathering you would see very commonly through the South during the mid-60s. But from the 70s onward, it’s really difficult to see them be able to turn out any group like that in those kinds of numbers,” he said.
Cunningham doesn’t pin the rise of the racially charged groups on politics as much as he does the police.
“When I looked at the data and what you really see is starting around 1966, there was a sharp uptick in the policing of organized white supremacy and through that policing it made it much more difficult for these groups to organize and mobilize.” Cunningham continued, “This is largely a policing story or a lack thereof.”
Starting around the 1960s, Cunningham said police in southern states would proactively inhibit the ability of these groups to gather. The police would make extensive requirements and refuse to grant permits not allowing them to mobilize.
“Certainly you could challenge some of those measures on constitutional grounds that they were interfering with their freedom of assembly, but that is what happened in the later 60s, and it was quite effective,” Cunningham said.
Cunningham’s call to action is to the police force. He argues that law enforcement should be proactive rather than reactive when it comes to these massive rallies and protests.
The police granted permits for these groups to protest and knew the size of both groups attending. Critics from both sides argued that law enforcement could have done more to manage the violence, saying they ‘stood on the sidelines.’ These racially charged hate groups, while morally wrong, do get the rights to assemble and do so often. But their rights to assembly only go so far, the demonstration must be peaceful, Saturday was far from it.
